The website for Viktor & Rolf’s fragrances. It has that luxury minimalism with the hint of edginess that personifies the label and does it beautifully. It also extracts consumer behaviour information from you with enough promises of presents and secrets to just make you love them all the more.

A reminder of why I love this brand so much…

What’s not::

…the new ad for Coca-Cola, from the Pemberton campaign.

Coca-Cola usually does some fantastic things with their ads, because let’s face it – they can afford it. They let agencies like Wieden & Kennedy show just how amazing they are. Preiously the focus has been on image, aspiration and emotion.

But this one brings the focus back to the drink itself, and the fact that it’s ‘all natural’. It talks about the recipe which was supposedly created by founder John Pemberton in 1886, which ‘hasn’t changed since’. (Not quite true.)

It has been pointed out that many people did not know that there are no artificial flavourings in the drink, but I think this is more because they haven ‘t thought about it. The thing is, nobody really knows what’s in Coke, and its fans don’t really care. If they wanted to be healthier, they’d just drink Coke Zero.

What really annoys me is that this ad really shows the drink as a ‘heritage’ kind of brand, which for me is intuitively wrong. The brand has been around for ages but the value in that is that it’s stayed ‘cool’ the whole time.

Coke’s niche isn’t some family-friendly, healthy segment. It isn’t even about an amazing tasting drink. You drink it because it makes you feel like it improves your lifestyle. By trying to move into another segment they may make people start thinking about what really is in their drink and lose fans along the way.

[Of course, there is the health issue which IS worrying…in Kenya the drink epitomises Western culture, and with increasing consumption the incidence of diabetes is also increasing.]

Still, the ‘Intrinsics’ campaign released simultaneously which uses ‘blipverts’ (5s ads) which evokes the sounds associated with Coke could be very effective.

After reading this article in Australia’s Marketing magazine on the recently banned fake Guinness viral, had some thought about who gets to define a brand. Is it, as the origin of the word would suggest, an image that is under the control of the company (or the brander)? Or it is perhaps, as the article opines, a negotiation?

I suppose as a form of communications, branding definitely involves a feedback loop that verifies the consumer’s impression of the message. However, with the often complex and/or subtle messages that comprise a brand, it’s easy for there to be mistakes or misinterpretations. Can branders really control it?

And what happens when someone decides to extend your brand without permission? If it’s in line with your current brand you win. If it isn’t, but the effect is positive, is it still okay? Does it reflect that you need to change your brand for the customer? And what does it tell you if it’s construed negatively, like the disasterous ‘make your own’ incidents (GM’s customer ads for the Chevy, and Nike’s customisable sneaker design, to name a couple).

Brands aren’t a physical thing that you can own; they’re not even a chose in action, protected by intellectual property laws. You can patent your inventions, copyright your content and trademark your business logos, and so if someone else tries to use them you at least have legal recourse. But a brand? if someone mishandles it, there’s nothing you can do to them, let alone to rectify what’s been done.

Should we just be resigning ourselves to not having complete control? There are already some ethical twinges at the extent marketers go to in order to reach into the subconscious of consumers; if we’re still not getting the results we want can we really go further?

I wish I had the answers to all these questions (but I guess if I did, I would have written a best-selling book by now and be lounging on a beach somewhere in Turks and Caicos).

The article also mentioned Coca-cola’s reaction to quite a fun viral video from a while back involving the reaction between Diet Coke and Mentos::

Since Coca-Cola consistently comes in at the top of Interbrand’s brand equity valuations, and given the amount of money they have spent to build that global brand so that they can charge a premium, I really wouldn’t blame their communications team for being a bit touchy over control. There’s a time to run with it and a time to distance yourself, and this just may have been a time to go with the flow. However – if brand is partly defined by the consumer and this helps to build the brand image, do they really lose out on any benefits by separating themselves from the video? I think not.